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Finally Finished: World of Timnath! Massive RPG World

I guess it's time to show you a mapping project I've been working on. It's based on very simple pencil maps a close friend of mine made for a fantasy world called "Timnath" about 30 years ago. Well, after over 120ish hours over the last month, I'm thrilled to say - I'm finished!

As some of you may recall, I posted a thread or two out here when I was struggling with finding the best techniques for a usable tabletop map style. This is a project that I actually started about four years ago, but (frankly) stalled out when I couldn't find a cartography style I could draw with that didn't take 15-20 hours per map tile. Inspiration hit over the holidays, I came up with a technique that let me work a map in about 3 hours (average), and I decided to finally attack the project from scratch one more time - and get these maps DONE!

To give you an idea of how big this thing really is: Each map tile is a full 8.5 x 11 inches @ 300ppi. When printed edge to edge this map is 110" (w) x 102" (h)! It contains numerous climates and features: Arctic, Alpine, Temperate, Arid, Volcanic, Swamp, Jungle, Desert, Mesas, Tropical, etc. Talk about diversity. Each hex is 9 sq miles (or 3 miles edge to edge).

Part of the project is to build a website around this fantasy world. As part of this, I put the map tiles all together in a webpage to show the whole "world" at once. You can click into any of the tiles for a close up. I'll be adding notes to all the maps as my friend sends them over, and making any necessary tweaks.

I still need to put together the map legend so everything makes more sense. Also, if you look, you'll note some anomalies with the rivers and some geographic "problems"... that's how the original maps were drawn, and my interpretation needed to respect those elements. It's a fantasy world where magic messes with everything anyway!

This is probably the single biggest creative project I've ever done. Whew, indeed!

Thanks very much. It should be known that this campaign world is still in use today. Since 1979. We have used the maps for everything from party travel, to encounter tables, to regional events, to full on military war gaming over approximately 200 in-game years; much of this was documented as we went.

Every single location, some dungeon markers, and every road, was put there (and subsequently destroyed or taken over) by a player character. Occasionally, PCs would drop stars on each other... or attempt to. Thus the many craters.

The campaign follows a loosely Ptolemaic cosmology. The world is flat, gradually sloping in altitude as you go West. It floats on an ocean, and the whole environment is contained by a glass sphere. Stars are suspended by powerful, magic threads which can be severed by high level mages who have discovered the appropriate spell...

On average we get together just about every Friday evening. Numerous players have come and gone, each leaving their mark. We have about 12 active players now. Ages 17-50.

I will be fleshing out the site as more comes available. There are some hand drawn cities that are jaw dropping in detail...

As planned, I went back and made a gigantic composite of all the tiles, then fixed all edge matching and created the continuous hex grid so it's all completely seamless edge-to-edge. The files were truly gargantuan (7.5GB for the geography and about 5GB for the various overlays). When flattened it's still a 200MB JPG. It comes in at 110" x 102". Yeowza.

Also created a nice legend so everything can be identified.

I recreated all the standard sized tiles with hex grid, then created a mega version that's only sliced into four huge tiles without a hex grid. I did this so we can do several other types of overlays and slice it up as needed. I'll be printing the quad tiles at work - so it should come out at 84" x 80", roughly. I can't wait to put it up on a big wall.

I got the opportunity to print the map at full size on a large plotter. Final printed size is 9' x 9.75'! Here are a few pics. For scale, there's a 12oz dixie cup and a large podium in the full map shots.